


Travelogue

by OldSchoolJohto



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Cities, Gen, Geography, Invisible Cities - Freeform, Isolation, POV Second Person, Travelogue, Wilderness, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2019-07-28 12:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16241576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldSchoolJohto/pseuds/OldSchoolJohto
Summary: An ongoing series of vignettes about relationships between people and space, inspired by Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities."To view with illustrations, visit http://oldschooljohto.wixsite.com/spring .





	1. Wilderness and Wonder: Route 119

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [They Keep Walking](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16241633) by [OldSchoolJohto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldSchoolJohto/pseuds/OldSchoolJohto). 



Leaving there and continuing east, you eventually reach a plateau that overlooks the clouds. A rainbow arcs between two clouds where the waterfall splits them. Beads of moisture cling to your eyelashes and stream down your rain poncho. Below you are the miles and miles of gentle but insistent rain you’ve been hiking through for two days.

And there are still miles left to go.

On either side of you, your mightyena and sceptile are like living sculptures, glittering with each movement. Predictably, your mightyena shakes itself, casting off mini rainbow sprays and the smell of wet fur. You cover your face, but not quickly enough. It doesn’t matter — you’ve been damp all week. More water won’t make a difference.

You wrap your backpack in a second rain poncho to keep it dry (you hope) while you take a break and enjoy the view. You alternate between doing shoulder stretches, munching on jerky, and tossing a mini frisbee for your mightyena to catch in the air. Each time he makes an impressive leap or catch, you toss him a piece of jerky. Your sceptile carves strips of inner bark off a nearby tree and eats them before shimmying up its trunk.

All around, water drips and plinks from every surface.

Then there are new sounds behind you: crunching footsteps and rustling leaves, heavy splashing, a trumpeting cry.

You turn in time to see a tropius come swaying out of the jungle, so close you could count the wrinkles around each eye. Your mind boggles at the creature’s proportions: it’s the size of a car, and yet it somehow nearly snuck up on you. It glances at you briefly and continues walking past unfazed. Before you can make a move to grab a pokeball, a second tropius pushes its way out of the trees, and then a third, and then a forth.

A herd of tropius makes its way onto the plateau, first stepping with surprising gingerness for their size and then picking up into a gallop. They move with no regard for you or your pokemon, forcing you to dive out of the way or be crushed. One thunders over the place where you crouch. You watch as each one reaches the cliff edge, spreads its enormous leafy wings, and glides over the rainbow-streaked clouds. They call to one another as they fly. The power and joy of that sound immobilizes you with awe.

You army crawl to the edge of the cliff and watch for over an hour, chin resting on your fist, as the tropius herd sink and rise and wheel about. You don’t care at all that you’re soaked by the time you stand up.

This is why you do it.


	2. Wilderness and Seeing: Route 34

The north-bound route to Goldenrod is pocketed with pools. You can’t see the ocean yet, but you can smell it. Unsurprisingly, the water is too salty to drink or refill your water bottles, but you leave your boots and socks among the reeds to wade in and you find it’s delightfully cold. Not so long ago, you would’ve been put off by the pond skaters and the prospect of mud between your toes. Now with sweat dripping between your shoulder blades and two days of dirt on your face, you crave it.

You carry your shoes under one arm and squelch through the salt marsh, your furret darting a few paces ahead, until you find a pool deep enough to submerge yourself completely. No longer caring who might see, you go in nude.

As the water closes over your head, you think of the bikini wadded in the bottom of your backpack. You remember telling your sister that it was a practical choice (even as you scrutinized your shape and tan lines in the mirror) because it wouldn’t take up much space. You imagined swimming laps at a gym with the dewgong you hoped to train, inventing need for the purchase. You haven’t used it once since you started your journey. You’ve become less vain.

However, you can’t help but wince looking at yourself more closely. Tens of bug bites and tiny cuts sting as the salt water washes over you. The bruise on your hip is turning yellow, a sign it’s healing but nasty-looking all the same. It’s been months since you’ve shaved your legs or painted your chipped toe nails. And why would you out here? Maybe you’ll treat yourself when you get to the city, look impressive for your next gym challenge. You clamber onto a rock with your cake of biodegradable soap and scrub at the dirt in the cracks of your callouses until your skin burns.

The scream of a predatory bird makes you look up. You spot the pidgeotto circling overhead. Not until it dives, surprisingly close by, does it occur to you to scan for your furret. You hear a squeak of terror and your stomach drops.

You splash to the edge of the pool and snatch your belt off your pile of clothes. As you raise the pokeball, the pidgeotto flashes past with something wriggling in its talons. You manage to recall your furret to her ball, and she dematerializes out of the pigeotto’s grip. The pigeotto visibly falters, off-balance at the sudden change in weight. With a scream it wheels and flies past you so closely you’re forced to duck. For a moment you worry you’re going to have to fight off a wild pokemon in the nude, but the pidgeotto pushes higher into the sky to continue its circling search.

Chastened, you towel off and throw your clothes on with your hair still dripping and the taste of salt water in your mouth.


	3. Cities and Seeing: Goldenrod

Water, you thought, implied beach.

You stand beneath a sign that warns against swimming and diving, wondering who would dare. Oil shimmers on the water’s surface. Plastic bottles and Rage Candy wrappers mass beneath the pier. Your rain coat is zipped over your swimsuit, hiding your error. It’s not raining hard, but it’s enough to soften the city’s electrical buzzings and distant sirens. You’ve been here for over an hour, half-waiting for someone to challenge and half-waiting for a better idea to come. It’s only been raining for fifteen minutes, and you can’t decide if it’s worth waiting for it to stop again.

At the sight of a growlithe you straighten, but you quickly realize it’s a pet, leashed to someone who looks like one of your mom’s friends. An occasional jogger passes. Not as many now as there were earlier.

The city is perhaps ugliest at twilight, when the shadows writhe with unpleasant possibility. The odds of earning a quick buck from a battle are waning fast. But as the orange streetlights come on, you watch another trainer approach from across the street. You count six pokeballs on the studded belt that shows under his hooded sweater.You guess he’s in his mid-thirties or early forties—not the oldest trainer you’ve encountered but still outside the usual—and has a strange, asymmetrical hairstyle. He stares straight ahead at you.

You try to guess what type of trainer he might be based on his clothes and gait. Perhaps dark types? You palm your poliwrath’s pokeball. Then again, what if he favors electric types and the rain drew him out to take advantage?

As the trainer draws closer, you realize what you mistook for his hair was actually a facial tattoo: a line of bones and barbed wire along his jaw and hairline. There’s something unpleasant in his stare, something beyond communicating a challenge. It occurs to you that he might not be looking at your belt but at your body. If there were other people here it wouldn’t feel so creepy, but there aren’t and it does. He smiles, and it’s not a friendly one.

It’s the smile that does it. You jump up from the railing where you’ve been leaning and tug your raincoat down over your belt. You start speed walking away, head down. Your pulse is loud in your ears.

“Hey!” he calls after you.

You release your haunter. “Let’s go, Keats!” you call to it, and you break into a run. You dash through a red light, grateful the rain has slowed the traffic.

Five blocks pass before you realize no one is following you, maybe never was.

 


	4. Wilderness and Silence: Viridian Forest

When you walk a long time through the wild, you begin to crave a city.

It’s not loneliness. Or… not only that. You’re fine without playing another game of Twenty Questions or I Spy.

For several months you traveled with a girl from your hometown named Olivia. “Challenge accepted,” she said when you invited her along. And it was a challenge. You’d been friends for several years, through high school and the trainer certificate program, and had spent most days after class at your house or at the arcade together. You were unprepared for how different it would feel to have only her for human company all day every day and all night every night. Even the silences were different, more crowded.

The two of you had a routine: You packed the tents while she made breakfast (usually oatmeal) and cleaned the cook gear. She made camp while you cooked dinner (usually EZ-Mac with soy protein bits and dehydrated greens.) After dinner you ran your pokemon through drills together and sparred. You miss that the most. She trained a delcatty (Darcy) and a swellow (Lurie) that paired perfectly against your manectric and golbat, blow for blow. You haven’t had a partner since who is as driven and eager without taking losses personally, and you know your team was leaner and faster when she was around.

But with Olivia there was always too much else going on. She masked her sentimentality with bathroom humor and punches, but she constantly took on strays. She would catch a pidgey with a broken wing or a rattata missing a fang sooner than something she actually wanted to train — she had a sixth sense for finding them, whether it was in a back alley of Saffron City or under a rock ledge. They were endearing to her because they were pathetic, and her fascination with the sickly repulsed you. She named them after her favorite movie characters and athletes (like a scrawny rattata she inexplicably named Tebow), and had detailed theories about what flavor of retiree or housewife in the next city would be best to adopt each of them as pets. She dragged you with her to knock on doors and make adoption pitches only once — you didn’t allow a second excursion. You spent a lot of time reading junk magazines and waiting for her when you traveled together.

One day, after a fight about Darwin and ecology, you told her you were going ahead and you’d meet her in town. You both knew without discussion that you wouldn’t meet up again. You also knew you both accepted the loss.

You still exchange emails when you pass through a town.

Since then you’ve shared your campfire a few times, but never for long. Always when it was someone who was headed the same way on the same trail and it would be more uncomfortable not to speak.

Tonight you sit on a blanket next to your fire, shuffling cards furiously and slapping them down. You like how the enormity of the woods at night makes those sounds small. You like the heat of the fire along one side of your body and the cool air through your unzipped parka. Your manectric rests his head on your thigh while your golbat hunts moths and maybe bigger things. You’re comfortable, but you wish it were a bar.

It’s not the crowd or the noise or even the alcohol you’re aching for but the choice. To talk to the person next to you or not. To have an IPA or a cocktail. To play pool or watch. To stay or go outside and experience something completely different: a bar with better music, a quieter bar, an empty street, a room with a door that locks.

The only way for you to exit this still night in Viridian Forest and choose something else is to walk. A lot.

You play solitaire for hours by campfire light. You play so much solitaire lately you’ve invented a few versions of your own. (In one, the different four suits represent wild pokemon of either advantageous or disadvantageous typing, pokeballs, or potions and must be defeated or avoided.) What you want more than anything tonight is to play poker, not for the chance to win cash but for the thrill of an intellectual challenge, an ending you can’t guess by yourself.

You want someone to say, “Challenge accepted.”


	5. Cities and Wonder: Slateport City

On your way to the coffee shop, you pass a sunburned trainer playing ukulele on the corner — Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.” She’s taught her combusken a few dance moves, modified from battle tactics and even punctuated with some pyrotechnics. The performance would be better suited to drums or even a violin —anything more aggressive than a ukulele— but it is charming all the same. After the chorus, you’re not the only one inspired to drop a few bills into the open ukulele case.

You’re still humming it to yourself as you enter the coffee shop. You pay for thirty minutes of computer time and a caramel machiato to make the task of checking your emails less… You sigh as you approach the monitor and bolster yourself with a sip of the sugary drink.

First is an email from your mother, which isn’t so bad. With a little distance — or, okay, a lot — you’ve begun to appreciate her more. Your emails tend not to follow a cohesive narrative, less like conversation and more like you are volleying stories at each other, back and forth across the void. You like it though. You learn more about her this way than you ever did when you were living at home arguing about brands of dishwasher detergent.

She never was a trainer, but she has stories of her own. Her latest email is the story of the time your father convinced her to go skydiving with him and how, no, it did not cure her fear of heights. You know this is her way of saying your last report--which included a battle with a would-be thief from the back of your altaria—had worried her, but that she trusted you.

You trade her the story of your arrival in Slateport, including the ukulele player. “With love,” comes easily at the end.

After that, there’s one from the bank, a few from mailing lists urging you to donate now to save this-and-that forest from development, and one from the insurance company. Nothing too scary.

Then you scroll back up to the email that makes your stomach clench just looking at it, the one you knew you’d find waiting for you. Jess wants to know when you expect to arrive in Slateport because she wants to come out to meet you, spend a few days in the city together…

You skim, catch yourself and drag your eye back to read more carefully. You know what you ought to say, but your hands freeze over the keyboard. Moments later, you catch yourself tying knots in the straw from your machiato. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s only words. It’s only pixels. You slurp down the last of your drink and muscle your way through a clumsy explanation of your feelings and, sheepishly, your whereabouts. You end, “With love,” but after staring a moment at the screen you erase it. Then you erase most of what you typed.

Over and over, your eyes are pulled to the people sitting nearby. Some look like students. Whatever the contents of your bank account and your inbox, you smile thinking that at least you’ll never be expected to write a paper about Chaucer. You wonder if they think something similar looking at you with your dusty boots and scars.

To your right is an old man who wears a feather in his cap — a real dandy. You notice with a start that he’s also wearing a trainer’s belt, all six slots filled. He types slowly with two fingers and you wonder who he’s writing to across the void.

You accidentally lock eyes with a pair of girls curled up in arm chairs against the far wall. They’re trainers too, possibly waiting for their chance on the computer. You offer a small smile, which sends them waving and giggling, clutching each other’s arms. They’re young — they have neon green and pink hair respectively and in their laps are backpacks swarming with buttons and patches and sequins. You shake your head but keep smiling.

When you return your gaze to the screen in front of you, twenty-seven minutes have gone by. Rather than paying for another half hour, you save your email as a draft, promising yourself to return tomorrow.

Outside, the sun is beginning to sink and the buildings and cars are lit fantastic shades of pink and orange. The air is warm and smells like the ocean. You watch people pass while you wait for the bus that will take you back to the hostel on the other side of town: lawyers, poets, trainers, joggers, thieves, and who knows who else. Each of them passes without knowing or caring who you are, and with each come snippets of stories whose endings and beginnings you’ll never learn.

The world is a library, you remember writing to your mother once.

The bus finally comes. You sit near the back. At the front, you see ukulele girl take a seat, placing on the seat beside her a bulging backpack with the ukulele case strapped to the outside with bungee cords. Go figure. You smile, close your eyes, and lean into the seat back. Through the dark, the hum of traffic and unintelligible chatter, complaints, and ringtones carry you to a place that might not be home but is as close as you need.


	6. Cities and Silence: Driftveil

“You have a light?”

A younger or drunker version of you would’ve brought out your typhlosion, delighting both in watching the large pokemon perform the delicate task and in lightly threatening another trainer. Instead you hand over your lighter and accept it back without comment.

You lean against the back wall of Judo Cufflink, a bar and music venue locals call The Cuff. Like every Driftveil joint you’ve been in, it’s a dive with cracked leather booths and peeling murals out back. You’ve heard it’s also known for occasional fights (both the kind that involve pokemon and the kind that involve just fists,) but the courtyard is calm now, hazy with smoke and conversation. You don’t smoke anymore but it’s cooler out here. Quieter too. The first band of the night — Something Punch, or maybe Punch Drunk Something — sucks. Too nasal, not enough bass.

You hoped to run into the cute girl from the hostel front desk who’d recommended this place to you but no such luck so far. It was a long shot anyway. You remind yourself, turning and turning the lighter in your pocket, that you’re almost certain to make a new friend or two in the next city. There are usually at least a few trainers from other regions on the gym circuit this time of year, easy connections over shared nostalgia mixed with defiance for your respective hometowns. If you could lock eyes with someone who isn’t that drunk or who’s the right kind of drunk and muscle your way through the small talk, you could probably find several such friends here in the courtyard, or maybe even something more. Flashing your badge collection has gotten you far before. Tonight though, the idea of possibility and potential sits sour in your stomach along with the cheap beers you drank earlier. You’ve talked to so many people exactly like the ones here before. You’re weary of temporary friends, of not knowing what to put in letters to your old friends. 

From inside you hear the lead singer howl, Shallow, shallow, shallow! I don't care if you don't care.

What’s the point?

It doesn’t matter that you already paid to see two more upcoming bands, you decide. You stand suddenly and walk through the wooden gate, down the sidewalk, past giggling punks and posturing trainers, past the convenience store, past the empty football field — you walk until the music and shouts fade into the distance and the rage in your heart quiets. 

You find yourself in a new part of town, far from the gym and the hostel. For a moment, you allow yourself to feel curious again. In the middle distance you can see some kind of complex, like a modern castle, and it draws you closer. You step softly as if to avoid startling away the stillness, to allow the moonlit path to reveal itself to you. 

Churches and homes give way to rectangular concrete buildings, as if they’ve abandoned you to this cold reality. Warehouses under harsh light cut sharp shadows. The lights, you imagine, are to dissuade thieves and pot-smoking teens and maybe even the odd trubbish from coming too close. These are factories, you guess, or shipping centers. It doesn’t matter which. These walls will always be closed to you, and there’s nothing inside you’d want to see. This place — the entire city— is designed to house machinery, not to inspire. No matter how far you walk there is no other hidden beauty to discover here. Only unrelenting purpose.

Ironic, you think, how hard you’ve worked and how far you’ve traveled only to find yourself in a place so like the one you first left.


	7. Wilderness and Hunger: Route 205

Most of your diet comes from boxes and bags: shrink-wrapped blocks that become noodles and ground meat when water is added, dried sauce in separate cellophane with flecks meant to represent vegetables, smoothie powder. You don’t mind it. 

Re-hydrated meals have a limited range of flavors, but they remind you of childhood and the time your father bought several crates of military MREs at a flea market. He kept things like that around for the same reason he ran weekly drills with his hoary old luxray — “Just in case,” said with a wink. You ate one under your bed with your pikachu plushie, unwrapping each inscrutable component with rabid fascination, and imagined yourself camping in a distant forest.

You’ve become an expert in repackaging meal kits for maximum efficiency. For example, the cardboard wrap is always the first thing to go. It takes up too much space, and even the lightest stuff can weigh you down if you have too much of it. Instead, you write labels and expiration dates on the cellophane in permanent marker. Sometimes you dehydrate your own food at a trainer supply store in town to save money (and you know folks who do it for their pokemon too, especially when preparing to travel through low-forage zones) but you prefer to skip the extra work if you can. 

Even trainers who gripe about re-hydrated food have to admit to one truth you learned early on: most nights, you’re so tired it doesn’t matter what you’re eating. After walking for miles with a backpack so heavy it bruises your collarbones until you eventually get used to it, after your pokemon accidentally singes off your eyebrows or tries to eat one of your other pokemon, after crawling through brambles chasing a gible that eventually gets away, after making camp and then immediately sitting on a stump and staring into the canopy for half an hour because you’re too tired to move… anything hot tastes good. Or tastes like nothing at all.

What you do miss, almost to your embarrassment, are sour straws, poke-O’s cereal, and especially cupcakes. Trainer meals are designed (yes, definitely designed and not cooked or crafted) with consideration for vitamins and minerals but not much else. They’re uniform in color and texture. Every now and then a meal pack might include what’s optimistically labeled as a “brownie,” which is firm, dense, and dry. (It contains ten percent of you daily recommended iron and protein intake though.) It doesn’t satisfy the craving. You lay in your tent at night fantasizing about your last birthday at home with the frosted funfetti cake. The luxury of sprinkles! You want cake so badly your stomach almost hurts from it.

When you finally arrive in Eterna City, you buy ten Hostess cupcakes at the first convenience store you pass. You plan to ration them out — and indeed, you start by pulling it apart and eating each layer slowly, licking icing off your fingers — but instead eat all ten in one sitting, wrappers spread around you on your hostel cot. The next day your stomach is so upset you reschedule your gym challenge.

You never eat another Hostess cupcake again — the smell alone is enough to make you sick.


End file.
